Vancouver, Day 0 and 1
Oct. 23rd, 2011 04:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobetOnly a day and a half into the trip, I think we can categorically say this was a good idea. I have been really worked up for the past couple months. I am not exactly worked up at the moment.
So!
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subject_zero picked me up at the airport last night after my first large-plane flight in quite a while (you don't even feel those landing. It's kind of amazing) and we parked my stuff at the hostel where I'm staying, smack in the middle of Vancouver's club district. Very late dinner (lobster ravioli, beer, cheescake, more beer) and filthy gossip ensued at a microbrewery by Waterfront Skytrain station. I have missed subject_zero terribly.
This was pretty much the night: it was late, I'd done a five-hour flight, and generally lying down seemed like a good idea.
The hostel's nice and tidy and cheerful and packed with Australians. My roommates for the moment are three pretty nice undergrads from Portland, up for their fall break, who were out clubbing until an amazing hour last night -- I didn't hear them come in, and I was up until about 3:30 Pacific (mostly wondering why I wasn't tired when it was past 6am on Brain Local Time, and how was I still awake?). This means I'm getting a certain amount of privacy: I'm out most of the day, and when I come back, it's the room to myself and playing my music and general chilling out for hours. There's free wifi and a common room, and the kitchen is huge. So far, it hostelling is beating the hell out of hotels.
Vancouver itself: cool and damp and ivy-covered, and full of crows, which apparently fill the niche that pigeons do at home. I can't get my finger on the architecture: it's this mix of curvy ultra-modern stuff and almost coastal US warm-climate houses, and the kind of pastel siding I've seen in the Midwest. There are a lot of condos, and there is a lot of green. It feels kind of young and slick. I don't get that sense of age, of layered history, I have back home. Also, decided lack of hipsters thus far. We may be in the wrong neighbourhoods for it. Surprising amount of on-street cosplay, though.
There is a thing the sky does here, heavy with three different-coloured striations of cloud, where it lies low and thick over the ocean and flows down into the mountains, and you feel...contained. Most effectively and completely contained, as if someone's put a lid over the top of the world. It's not oppressive -- everything is sort of too big and stately green to feel oppressive, really -- but that cloudy sky is like a hand light on your shoulder. You can never quite forget it's there.
It's a curious and beautiful city. I'm pretty rock-certain already I could never live here. There are red maples planted here and there, and I kept lingering among their leaves, just hungry for the shocks of colour amidst all the soft grey.
This morning, rolled out of bed to what looked like it was going to be rain (the rain never actually materialized) and met up withsubject_zero around noon to go to the Granville Island Public Market. First rule of Vancouver: Everything is always farther than you think. No, really. Farther.
This will become important to the story later.
So we walked across the Granville Street bridge and around and down and in this weird loop to get to the island, which is sort of like what would happen if someone took a tourist town or that one area of Charlottetown, PEI and smacked it in the middle of some other city: lots of little shops, crafts, nice wide sidewalks, etc. Considering how much we had to backtrack to get there, I suspect the artists have been corralled onto the island in the middle of the river to keep them contained (like Escape from New York, just without the President). It's small and lovely, and the farmer's market there is a bit like St. Lawrence: spread through a few buildings, and reasonably broad. I should probably not be so surprised at how comfortable I am in a market, but it's like finding my safe place. We'll probably be going back Monday or Tuesday to stock up for the trip to Seattle.
But for today, we picked up a whole bunch of food -- walnut and rosemary bread, cheese curds, honey garlic pepperoni sticks, Indian candy, passion fruit, tiny little bananas, pomegranates, Fuji apples -- to be our provisions for Stanley Park.
Stanley Park is...not a park as I am familiar with them. It is an old growth rainforest, lurking at the edge of a city. It smells soft and sharp like fallen leaves and the ocean, and it's damp everywhere, even though it didn't rain; I'm convinced it was just damp out of sheer habit. There's a seawall running along the outside, with historical plaques and such facing the bay, and steps down to the water in case you for some reason want to walk down into the ocean. And then there are trails and trails everywhere though the woods. We ate passion fruit and bread on park benches by a stand of totem poles, and watched the mountains, and found which redwoods are in fact Ents.
Thing is, it's is also farther than you think it is, and bigger.
We were overall shooting for Prospect Point, at the far north end of the park: kind of rambling about, looking at things, taking our time. What we took is probably the most roundabout, longest, least efficient route to Prospect Point that mankind has ever invented. It was extremely scenic and a great walk. But then it was 5pm, and we were only halfway there. And our feet really hurt. There was...some interesting and creative swearing. And a few kind of tired giggles.
But since this is adventure day? We went anyways.
It was maybe kind of stupid: if we'd turned around, we could have grabbed a lazy dinner and whatnot, and probably felt better for it in the morning. But it was also kind of worth it: The view out to the ocean is kind of ridiculously incredible, and catching it with the sun going down was probably even better. There was also a cafe up there, and we sat down (yay!) and ate some things with protein in them (yay!), having already demolished most of our snacks. And then we, well. Had to get back out of the park, all the way back where we'd come from.
Yeah. *g*
Walking down through Stanley Park at night is a bit like Escape from Witch Mountain, or a whole subgenre of horror movies and/or Criminal Minds episodes. Whole legions of my relatives are never going to find out that happened so I don't get strangled, revived, and strangled again. But? High adventure, people. High effing adventure. Also, the road straight through the middle is really a lot faster than whatever it was we did on the way up.
We ended up sitting for an hour or two in a coffeeshop near Burrard Station trying to make our feet do things again, puttering and chatting and eating Nanaimo bars. The other thing Vancouver seems to do so far is be musically no later than 1998 at all times: both today's coffeeshops, the one I grabbed breakfast at this morning and the one we found this evening, and the hostel both this morning and tonight in the common room were playing stuff I haven't heard since I was 16. Also, the Burrard coffeeshop rickrolled us. And we don't think it was ironic.
So after all that, we split up for the day and I stumbled back to the hostel (with a side trip through Occupy Vancouver on the way) and tucked what leftover groceries I had in the kitchen with an eye to climbing into bed early. Instead, ended up in a two-hour conversation with a severely cute guy from Dublin who handed me a spoon and shared his pint of Ben and Jerry's with me in the hostel kitchen (another point in favour of hostelling: cute Dubliners! Ice cream!). And now I am on my bunk, frittering about the Internet with extremely sore feet and a general and fuzzy sort of contentment. I'm hoping to be up for the two-dollar breakfast downstairs tomorrow morning, so sleep is soon.
...and yeah, that was only the first full day of nine.
Tomorrow's only half-planned: definitely Chinatown, and definitely my little walkthrough of Main and Hastings, so as to write Indestructible properly, with tastes and detail and smells. No idea what else we might get up to. It probably depends on the state of our feet, and the weather, and the operant whimsy.
Thrilling updates tomorrow. Goodnight, children everywhere.
So!
subject_zero picked me up at the airport last night after my first large-plane flight in quite a while (you don't even feel those landing. It's kind of amazing) and we parked my stuff at the hostel where I'm staying, smack in the middle of Vancouver's club district. Very late dinner (lobster ravioli, beer, cheescake, more beer) and filthy gossip ensued at a microbrewery by Waterfront Skytrain station. I have missed subject_zero terribly.This was pretty much the night: it was late, I'd done a five-hour flight, and generally lying down seemed like a good idea.
The hostel's nice and tidy and cheerful and packed with Australians. My roommates for the moment are three pretty nice undergrads from Portland, up for their fall break, who were out clubbing until an amazing hour last night -- I didn't hear them come in, and I was up until about 3:30 Pacific (mostly wondering why I wasn't tired when it was past 6am on Brain Local Time, and how was I still awake?). This means I'm getting a certain amount of privacy: I'm out most of the day, and when I come back, it's the room to myself and playing my music and general chilling out for hours. There's free wifi and a common room, and the kitchen is huge. So far, it hostelling is beating the hell out of hotels.
Vancouver itself: cool and damp and ivy-covered, and full of crows, which apparently fill the niche that pigeons do at home. I can't get my finger on the architecture: it's this mix of curvy ultra-modern stuff and almost coastal US warm-climate houses, and the kind of pastel siding I've seen in the Midwest. There are a lot of condos, and there is a lot of green. It feels kind of young and slick. I don't get that sense of age, of layered history, I have back home. Also, decided lack of hipsters thus far. We may be in the wrong neighbourhoods for it. Surprising amount of on-street cosplay, though.
There is a thing the sky does here, heavy with three different-coloured striations of cloud, where it lies low and thick over the ocean and flows down into the mountains, and you feel...contained. Most effectively and completely contained, as if someone's put a lid over the top of the world. It's not oppressive -- everything is sort of too big and stately green to feel oppressive, really -- but that cloudy sky is like a hand light on your shoulder. You can never quite forget it's there.
It's a curious and beautiful city. I'm pretty rock-certain already I could never live here. There are red maples planted here and there, and I kept lingering among their leaves, just hungry for the shocks of colour amidst all the soft grey.
This morning, rolled out of bed to what looked like it was going to be rain (the rain never actually materialized) and met up with
subject_zero around noon to go to the Granville Island Public Market. First rule of Vancouver: Everything is always farther than you think. No, really. Farther.This will become important to the story later.
So we walked across the Granville Street bridge and around and down and in this weird loop to get to the island, which is sort of like what would happen if someone took a tourist town or that one area of Charlottetown, PEI and smacked it in the middle of some other city: lots of little shops, crafts, nice wide sidewalks, etc. Considering how much we had to backtrack to get there, I suspect the artists have been corralled onto the island in the middle of the river to keep them contained (like Escape from New York, just without the President). It's small and lovely, and the farmer's market there is a bit like St. Lawrence: spread through a few buildings, and reasonably broad. I should probably not be so surprised at how comfortable I am in a market, but it's like finding my safe place. We'll probably be going back Monday or Tuesday to stock up for the trip to Seattle.
But for today, we picked up a whole bunch of food -- walnut and rosemary bread, cheese curds, honey garlic pepperoni sticks, Indian candy, passion fruit, tiny little bananas, pomegranates, Fuji apples -- to be our provisions for Stanley Park.
Stanley Park is...not a park as I am familiar with them. It is an old growth rainforest, lurking at the edge of a city. It smells soft and sharp like fallen leaves and the ocean, and it's damp everywhere, even though it didn't rain; I'm convinced it was just damp out of sheer habit. There's a seawall running along the outside, with historical plaques and such facing the bay, and steps down to the water in case you for some reason want to walk down into the ocean. And then there are trails and trails everywhere though the woods. We ate passion fruit and bread on park benches by a stand of totem poles, and watched the mountains, and found which redwoods are in fact Ents.
Thing is, it's is also farther than you think it is, and bigger.
We were overall shooting for Prospect Point, at the far north end of the park: kind of rambling about, looking at things, taking our time. What we took is probably the most roundabout, longest, least efficient route to Prospect Point that mankind has ever invented. It was extremely scenic and a great walk. But then it was 5pm, and we were only halfway there. And our feet really hurt. There was...some interesting and creative swearing. And a few kind of tired giggles.
But since this is adventure day? We went anyways.
It was maybe kind of stupid: if we'd turned around, we could have grabbed a lazy dinner and whatnot, and probably felt better for it in the morning. But it was also kind of worth it: The view out to the ocean is kind of ridiculously incredible, and catching it with the sun going down was probably even better. There was also a cafe up there, and we sat down (yay!) and ate some things with protein in them (yay!), having already demolished most of our snacks. And then we, well. Had to get back out of the park, all the way back where we'd come from.
Yeah. *g*
Walking down through Stanley Park at night is a bit like Escape from Witch Mountain, or a whole subgenre of horror movies and/or Criminal Minds episodes. Whole legions of my relatives are never going to find out that happened so I don't get strangled, revived, and strangled again. But? High adventure, people. High effing adventure. Also, the road straight through the middle is really a lot faster than whatever it was we did on the way up.
We ended up sitting for an hour or two in a coffeeshop near Burrard Station trying to make our feet do things again, puttering and chatting and eating Nanaimo bars. The other thing Vancouver seems to do so far is be musically no later than 1998 at all times: both today's coffeeshops, the one I grabbed breakfast at this morning and the one we found this evening, and the hostel both this morning and tonight in the common room were playing stuff I haven't heard since I was 16. Also, the Burrard coffeeshop rickrolled us. And we don't think it was ironic.
So after all that, we split up for the day and I stumbled back to the hostel (with a side trip through Occupy Vancouver on the way) and tucked what leftover groceries I had in the kitchen with an eye to climbing into bed early. Instead, ended up in a two-hour conversation with a severely cute guy from Dublin who handed me a spoon and shared his pint of Ben and Jerry's with me in the hostel kitchen (another point in favour of hostelling: cute Dubliners! Ice cream!). And now I am on my bunk, frittering about the Internet with extremely sore feet and a general and fuzzy sort of contentment. I'm hoping to be up for the two-dollar breakfast downstairs tomorrow morning, so sleep is soon.
...and yeah, that was only the first full day of nine.
Tomorrow's only half-planned: definitely Chinatown, and definitely my little walkthrough of Main and Hastings, so as to write Indestructible properly, with tastes and detail and smells. No idea what else we might get up to. It probably depends on the state of our feet, and the weather, and the operant whimsy.
Thrilling updates tomorrow. Goodnight, children everywhere.
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no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 10:50 am (UTC)Remember what we learned today? "Everything is always further than you think." No, really.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 06:42 pm (UTC)Severely cute Irish boy, though, did confirm this morning that it's maybe a half-day excursion at best.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 12:13 am (UTC)Well, if you guys want to get together, my free day is Wednesday: we're getting in eveningish on Tuesday, and probably going straight to dinner with the friends we're crashing with that night.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-26 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-26 06:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 12:51 pm (UTC)Also I looooved the Granville Island Public Market, and I cursed my fate for the fact that I had to go through US customs and could only get as much fruit and veg as I could consume while in Vancouver.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 01:55 pm (UTC)(Did you get the cute Dublin guy's name? :P )
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 12:16 am (UTC)We are possibly doing drinks tonight. *g*
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 10:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 06:56 pm (UTC)Are you staying @ the HI hostel near the gay district and a bit south of Stanley Park? That's where I was. I really loooooved Granville Market (walked over Burrard Bridge to get there instead of taking the ferry 'cause there was a sushi place I wanted to check out on the way), the feel was really low-key when I went and it didn't seem as touristy/desperate as Pike's Place (and I say that in spite of the fact that I did enjoy Pike's Place).
Stanley Park is my kind of park: perhaps a little too urban for me for it to be my Ideal Park but I am definitely a Pacific/NorCal/West Coast boy at heart. I love all the low clouds whooshing past overhead and across the water, the grey, the cold water and the rocky beaches, the damp, and the juxtaposition of evergreens/ocean. That's pretty awesome that you got to see the sun set into the water from the Park; it was too cloudy during my time in Vanc for that.
What part of town was Occupy Vancouver located in? Didn't have time to visit Chinatown during my stay there but it looked awesome (my bus went through it on my first day there), so I know you'll have a great time there. :D
Glad you're having a great time and keep us updated on your travels. <3
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 12:19 am (UTC)The whole west coast park thing is really new to me (well, first time on the west coast). And the weather's been lovely: today it's sunny and clear and bright.
Occupy's in front of the art gallery -- somewhere around Granville and Dunsmuir? It's pretty wickedly organized. We were impressed.
Went to Chinatown today, and it was kind of small/mostly closed; apparently BC still doesn't do Sunday so much. Got some creditable dim sum, though, and the Chinese garden was absolutely beautiful.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-25 04:00 am (UTC)